Category Archives: France

France: constitutional court approves veil ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

France’s constitutional court has approved the law set to ban wearing the Islamic full veil in public. It approved it almost in its entirety, making one small change: the law will not apply to public places of worship where it may violate religious freedom.

The proposed measure had already been passed by parliament. It is due to come into force next spring.

The law makes it illegal to wear garments such as the niqab or burka, which incorporate a full-face veil, anywhere in public. Under the ban, persons found wearing a full veil in public will face a fine of 150 euros (£130) and/or a citizenship course.

A last challenge is possible at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where decisions are binding.

BBC News, 7 October 2010

French student sues employer who refused to let him use Muslim name

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A 19-year-old secondary school student is suing his former employer for racism, claiming that he was fired for refusing to tell clients his name was Alexander, not Mohamed, France Info radio reported Wednesday.

Mohamed was to carry out a one-month training period as a marketing agent at a food delivery company in the northern city of Tournes when he was let go because he refused to lie about his name.

His job was to have been to phone clients and propose special offers. Apparently, his employer felt that the name Mohamed would alienate potential customers.

According to a 2009 ruling by the French Court of Cassation, the country’s top court, forcing employees to change their name because of their origin constitutes discrimination.

DPA, 6 October 2010

France: man charged with inciting religious hatred after burning, urinating on Qur’an

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A blogger who filmed himself burning the Koran and urinating on it to put out the flames is to appear in court in eastern France, charged with incitement to religious hatred, legal sources said on Tuesday.

In the film, which was posted on the Internet, the 30-year-old blogger from Bischheim near Strasbourg is seen sitting in his living room wearing a devil’s mask and tearing pages out of a copy of the Koran to make paper airplanes.

He then throws the airplanes at two upended boxes, arranged to look like the Twin Towers in New York, before burning the book on his balcony and urinating on it.

“He claims full responsibility. He says he’s not a right-wing extremist but that in France he can burn the Koran, just as he can burn a Winnie the Pooh book, without worrying about the consequences,” Strasbourg deputy prosecutor Gilles Delorme told Reuters.

The Strasbourg blogger gave no explanation for his act, Delorme said, but the incident is the latest in a spate of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim acts of vandalism in the city since the start of the year.

Reuters, 5 October 2010

French right-wing group tries to organise anti-Islam ‘debate’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), the political party of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, was forced on Tuesday to cancel a public debate organized in its headquarters, amid concerns that the debate would spark new accusations of racism and discrimination.

Titled “Immigration, Islamism: Is France Threatened?“, the controversial debate did not come at a good time for UMP, which is now presenting a new bill on immigration in the Assemblee Nationale (National Assembly), the lower house of French bicameral Parliament.

“We have chosen this time to really participate in Parliament discussions on future immigration law, as they are starting this week and will be at full intensity on that day,” explained the Droite Libre (Free Right), the UMP-associated group that organized the meeting.

“These issues are a concern to our fellow citizens, yet they almost never have a chance to discuss them; those who dare to mention immigration and Islam are framed by the intellectual terror of ‘political correctness’.”

When French media made public the title of the debate planned Sept. 30, UMP quickly stepped back and asked Droite Libre to hold the meeting in another place. Officially, said UMP, ultra-conservative Droite Libre is not a group associated with the presidential Party. This would not seem so from the Droite Libre website, which proudly bears the UMP logo.

“In view of the importance of our event and fears expressed by the UMP management board facing biased press reports, our debate will be hosted by the National Assembly,” Droite Libre announced later.

Epoch Times, 29 September 2010

It seems that the National Assembly doesn’t want to host the debate either. See Le Figaro, 29 September 2010

36 Muslim graves desecrated in Strasbourg

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Strasbourg graves vadalised

AFP reports that 36 Muslim graves in Meinau cemetery in Strasbourg were vandalised on Thursday night. Some tombstones were overturned, others smashed. Children’s graves were among those damaged. Three swastikas were drawn on the gravel paths. Abdelaziz Choukri of the Strasbourg Grand Mosque pointed out that the attack had taken place on the eve of a event organised by the far-right Front National in the city.

This is the latest in a series of such attacks. In July, 27 graves were desecrated in the Jewish cemetery of Wolfisheim near Strasbourg. In June, 17 Muslim gravestones were knocked over or damaged in the Robertsau cemetery, north of the city. In January, about thirty graves in the Jewish cemetery of Cronenbourg (to the west of Strasbourg) had been damaged on the day of the commemoration of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

Update:  See “Cemeteries desecrated in Strasbourg: three skinheads receive prison sentences”, Islamophobia Watch, 20 June 2012

Strasbourg graves vadalised (2)

 

 

French Senate backs veil ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

France’s Senate has overwhelmingly approved a bill that would ban wearing the Islamic full veil in public. The proposed measure was already backed by the lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, in July. The ban will come into force in six months’ time if it is not overturned by constitutional judges.

BBC News, 14 September 2010

See also Guardian, 14 September 2010

‘Islamization’ of Paris a warning to the West, claims Pat Robertson

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network makes its contribution to the hysteria surrounding the Park51 development with a scaremongering report about how Muslims are taking over Paris. Following the report, Robertson helpfully explains that Islam isn’t just a religion, it’s “a political system that is meant to achieve world domination”.

EDL launches ‘European Defence League’, organises Amsterdam demo in support of Wilders

Posted on by Bob Pitt

EDL Bradford4The English Defence League (EDL), the anti-Muslim ‘street army’ composed largely of football hooligans that burst onto the front pages of British newspapers in the last year as a result of its often violent protests, is to hold a rally in Amsterdam in October, EUobserver has learned.

The EDL is to demonstrate in support of Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-immigrant firebrand, with a recently launched French Defence League and Dutch Defence League, modelled on the English group, to join them along with other anti-Islamic militants from across Europe.

The demonstration in Amsterdam is due to take place on 30 October, according to the EDL website. Mr Wilders heads to court at the end of next month on charges of inciting racism. The case begins 5 October, with a verdict expected 2 November.

Joining them there will be members of the recently formed Dutch Defence League and French Defence League, both modelled on the EDL. The latter draws its members from the ranks of far-right supporters of the Paris Saint Germain football club, known in France for long harbouring a far-right element among the club’s supporters, although elsewhere on the continent, according to EDL spokesman Steve Simmons, not all the defence-league-linked groups have their origins in football hooliganism.

The French Defence League, which employs both an anglophone version of its name and “Ligue Francaise de Defense,” founded in May and more latterly takes the name Ligue 732, after a group of Paris Saint Germain supporters, that, according the outfit, “tries to unify all French Casuals, Ultras and French Fans to fight against Radical Islam.”

The 732 figure references the year that the French king Charles the Hammer, the grandfather of Charlemagne, won a victory at the Battle of Tours halting Islamic expansion in western Europe.

Mr Simmons told EUobserver that militants from the “anti-Jihad movement” in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and “other European states” will join them in Amsterdam for the launch of what is termed the “European Defence League” or, alternately, the much cuddlier “European Friendship Initiative.”

“I would also like to take this opportunity to announce a new demonstration that is to take the English Defence League global,” Tommy Robinson, the pseudonym of the group’s leader, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a former member of the BNP, wrote on the EDL website in a missive in July.

“You may be aware that the great man Geert Wilders is in court for race hate charges,” he continued. “The EDL has been in contact with our European brothers and sisters and we have decided that on Saturday, 30 October the European Defence League will be demonstrating in Amsterdam in support of Geert. We hope that all of you will be able to join us for this, what promises to be a landmark demonstration for the future of the defence leagues.”

“We feel that freedom of speech is being eroded and a lot of appeasing of radical muslims and Islam in general. Geert has the courage to take this on and we want to support him,” the group’s spokesman, Steve Simmons, told EUobserver.

EUobserver, 31 August 2010

France’s ban on the veil has nothing to do with women’s emancipation

Posted on by Bob Pitt

If there were any doubt about the motivation for the ban on Islamic face coverings passed by the French national assembly in July, the Sarkozy government’s actions in August have laid them to rest.

The issue isn’t women’s emancipation, for all the pious rhetoric we’ve heard about equality being a “primordial value” of the French nation. It isn’t the danger that terrorists and robbers will hide behind burqas in order to blow up buildings or rob banks – the exemptions in the law for motorcycle helmets, fencing and ski masks, and carnival costumes quickly dispel that argument. And it isn’t about enforcing openness and transparency as an aspect of French culture.

Outlawing what the French call “le voile intégral” is part of a campaign to purify and protect national identity, purging so-called foreign elements – although many of these “foreigners” are actually French citizens – from membership in the nation. It is part of a cynical bid by Sarkozy and his party to capture the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim animus that has brought electoral gains to the rightwing National Front party and to disarm the Socialist opposition, which has so far offered little resistance to the xenophobic campaign.

Joan Wallach Scott, author of that excellent book The Politics of the Veil, writes in the Guardian, 26 August 2010

Immigration minister opposes ban on veil – Toby Young not happy

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Toby_YoungIn an interview with the Sunday Telegraph immigration minister Damian Green is quoted as saying:

“I stand personally on the feeling that telling people what they can and can’t wear, if they’re just walking down the street, is a rather un-British thing to do. We’re a tolerant and mutually respectful society.

“There are times, clearly, when you’ve got to be able to identify yourself, and people have got to be able to see your face, but I think it’s very unlikely and it would be undesirable for the British Parliament to try and pass a law dictating what people wore.

“I think very few women in France actually wear the burka. They [the French parliament] are doing it for demonstration effects.”

Elsewhere in the Telegraph, under the headline “By refusing to ban the burka, Damian Green is supporting the humiliation of millions of British women”, Toby Young informs his readers that “the burka is both a symbol and a source of the oppression of Muslim women”.

According to Young: “Few people can be in any doubt that Islam is a deeply misogynistic religion.” As for wearing the veil, according to Young “for most Muslim women it is not a free choice but something they’re forced to do by their fathers or brothers or husbands – and the consequences of disobeying can be a beating or worse”.

To which we can only respond: Few people can be in any doubt that Toby Young is a deeply ignorant bigot.

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